Burry Bullish on AI Chip Startup Etched, Calls It "Serious Competition" for Nvidia

Nvidia's most prominent skeptic just pointed to a new competitor for the chip giant.

Michael Burry declared Tuesday that "this is serious competition for NVDA," pointing to a Wall Street Journal report on Etched—a startup that has quietly poached a significant number of engineering talent from Nvidia over the past two years.

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This is serious competition for NVDA.

The startup says it took just 44 days to get test chips from TSMC running inference workloads—the computing process that allows AI models to respond to user queries—a...

— Cassandra Unchained, August 18, 2026

According to the report, Etched said it took just 44 days after receiving test chips from TSMC to get them running inference workloads. The report noted that this process typically takes six months or longer.

At the heart of this speed is Brian Loiler, who spent 22 years at Nvidia building its HGX and DGX server systems before being recruited by Etched as vice president of platforms in 2024.

Since joining, Loiler has helped poach roughly a dozen engineers from Nvidia—some of whom turned down richer retention counteroffers, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to the report, Nvidia alumni now make up about 15% of Etched's roughly 400-person workforce.

A chip built for one job

Etched's flagship product is a chip called Sohu, which is specifically designed to run Transformer-based AI models—the architecture behind large language models like ChatGPT—rather than serving as a general-purpose GPU like Nvidia's chips, CNBC reported at the company's debut.

The startup raised a $120 million Series A in 2024, backed by Peter Thiel and Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Reuters reported at the time. Etched completed a $300 million Series C in July, valuing it at $10.3 billion, led by Sequoia with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix.

The bottom line

Burry has been hammering the same point for months: Nvidia's grip on AI chips is not as unbreakable as Wall Street thinks. Etched gives him a new argument—a two-year-old startup whose management ranks are almost entirely made up of Nvidia's own engineers.

NVDA stock price action: As of Tuesday's publication, Nvidia shares were down 2.24% at $219.97.